You can kind of think of Linsa as the fast fashion of self-portraits.

There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

So if your social media feeds are anything like mine, that you probably have been seeing these AI images of your friends all over Facebook.

And it really reminded me of a few other early Facebook picture trends,

like when we all picked cartoon characters or famous actors that we thought we

looked like, and all changed our profile pictures to reflect that. I'm probably dating myself

a little bit here, but early Facebook was full of earnest stuff like that, and this AI image

generation trend kind of seems like a callback to those days. So at first, I was confused,

but then I started to get intrigued.

I mean, who doesn't want to see a representation of themselves

reimagined in an otherworldly, futuristic, cyberpunk aesthetic?

So I tracked down where they were all coming from

and found Lenseth, the app behind these viral images.

So there I was, finding myself happily clicking around the app and scrolling around looking

for the 10 to 20 pictures of myself that they said they needed to generate AI images.

And it wasn't until I was prompted to grab my credit card that I pumped the brakes.

First of all, isn't it funny how easy it is, at least for me,

to set aside the inclination to ask questions if everyone else is doing something on social media

and it looks kind of fun or cool? I am embarrassed about how quickly I went from, this is stupid,

to I should probably try it. And I feel like this is exactly the feeling that tech companies are so good at

exploiting in all of us. So what exactly are the ethical and privacy implications of using an AI

...